


Anything Else We Might Have Seen at the Time

by tsukum



Category: Subarashiki Kono Sekai | The World Ends With You
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-17
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-04-21 06:50:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4819340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsukum/pseuds/tsukum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Joshua and Neku meet at age twelve, form the Joshua and Neku Junior Detectives Club, become best friends, like, <i>forever</i>, and the Long Game happens later. Dead friend Joshua.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. balloon hangin' on a Highwire

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. More detailed/lengthy/loquacious fic summary:  
>  __  
> About Joshua before he was the Composer, Neku before he was the Proxy, and the relationship between Joshua and Neku during the years leading up to the Long Game, the Long Game itself, and its aftermath. Josh/Neku, side Shiki/Eri, canon divergence, slow burn, Normal Kids AU™ (for a while, anyway), gratuitous and pretentious literary references. Or: An exploration of the combined ideas of (1) Neku's dead childhood friend from Another Day also having lived in the "main" Long Game timeline and (2) Joshua having been this friend. Or: _We'll start with goodbye, stop with hello._
> 
>  **2\. Content warnings:** Themes dealt with in this story will include: teenagers committing suicide, bullying, mental illness, parental neglect, and homophobia. And quite a bit of general unpleasantness. Oof. But hey, there's a great big amount of general happiness too! 'Cause that's what life is like. And I won't give away the ending, but it would be a downer if this fic totally ended on an angsty note, wouldn't it?

  
This is how Neku met Joshua for the first time:

It was the first of April, 2003. Neku was twelve. He still had freckles because he still sometimes went outside. (I know it's very difficult to imagine, but if you'll just suspend your disbelief for a moment.) And for your information, he wasn't lost in Shibuya, he was just getting his bearings. His family had finished moving to Yotsuya, Tokyo from the boonies, Niigata less than a week ago, and Neku had woken up this morning and hitched the subway to Shibuya— alone— on a pilgrimage for a CAT piece he’d heard about on the internet. The school where Neku would be cannonballing into his first year of junior high didn’t start for two more weeks, so it wasn’t like he had anything else to do. The problem with his current plan, though, was that no one seemed to know where the mural he was looking for was. Neku had written down directions on his hand before he left home, but compared to his hometown, Shibuya was practically labyrinthine, and he’d finally spent enough time aimlessly wandering the streets for even he to admit he was lost. Retracing his steps, he’d ended up back in front of that weird statue...

Hachiko. It was about eleven in the morning on a Monday, so it was crowded, but not quite choked. People waiting for people. A mousy girl with a My Melody charm on her phone. A few feet away from the main circle, a boy in a yellow ski jacket reading manga on a bench. Neku was usually someone who lived in the cities built in his own head. But as he stood in place, puzzling over his instructions, there was this weird flash of light in his peripheral vision, like a reflection on a mirror. 

Maybe it was because it was so hard to read the tiny, sweat-smeared letters on his palm. Maybe it was because he’d been up the better half of last night, tiring out his eyes, unpacking and sorting old art projects and boxes of supplies. Whatever the reason was, the light seemed blinding and was excruciatingly distracting. Neku’s head snapped up. Where was it coming from? He searched the square, irritated. There it was again! Where— his eyes traced lines through the empty air. Around the edges of the paved area, the shifting of thin green leaves, skinny trees with skinny branches, entwining and choking each other, planted artificially in expensive soil— up there. The source of the light. Stillness, nothing, and then something flashing, bright as a bomb. In the trees? No— a balcony, hidden behind them. Actually, a restaurant patio. For some reason Neku was extremely curious. He sidestepped to get a better look, without realizing in particular what he was doing. 

A table. A boy. He was sitting alone. He looked like he needed a haircut the navy cardigan he was wearing accounted for about sixty percent of his weight. The sparkle was coming from something he was holding in his lap, intentionally— shielding— trying to keep attention from with his hand? What was it. Neku squinted. Something, a, a magnifying glass?

He either didn't see Neku or didn't think that he was worth paying extra attention to yet. Fine by him. Neku followed the boy's gaze to a different boy, sitting on a bench below. This boy was taller and built more like a soda machine, the one wearing a yellow ski jacket and a bad haircut. He was reading some manga Neku couldn't make out the title of— a girl with a sword and a short skirt on the cover. Looking closer, Neku saw the intense patch of light on one page of the boy's book. 

Someone with an untrained eye would never have caught that.

The positioning was perfect, Neku realized instantly. From where the boy with the book was sitting, the cardigan boy would be invisible, obscured by the placement of the trees. If ski jacket was focused enough on what he was reading, which he was, then he wouldn't notice the intensifying sunlight on the page. Wait, wait. 

_Was he…_

Neku didn’t really remember jumping the balcony, but he was sitting at the empty table next to Joshua’s before he knew it. His sneakers were scuffed at the toes and his left knee had suffered a minor scrape, but the shoes were old and the injury wasn’t anything to make you blink. A waiter doing his damndest to rock a handlebar moustache glared at Neku’s back, so he ordered a lemonade. He studied his mark. On his table was a single slice of cake, some exotic flavor that didn’t look too sweet, garnished with lavender flower petals. It sat on the plate nibbled at but mostly uneaten. Next to it, a 1,000 yen note had been laid out on the check holder, neat and straight as a coffin. 

Up close now, Neku could see that the thing semi-concealed in Joshua's lap was indeed a magnifying lens. It looked like something that might come in the entomology kit of a child whose relatives had terrible taste in gifts. With its bold black rims it was out of place in the hand that held it, which was more like a thin, papery spider. As for the enigma in the chair himself, he looked like no one Neku had ever seen before. He was jagged, and the space around him formed the shape of teeth.

By now he boy knew that Neku knew what he was doing. He made no move whatever to acknowledge his acknowledgement— in fact, he never took his eyes off the page on his victim’s book— but understanding had lowered itself down into the air and settled there. The lack of response was not because he was so focused on his task that he had forgotten about his surroundings. He watched his work with a sharp readiness, a scarecrow trembling for the first sign of fire. He was as aware of the gangly kid who had just jumped the balcony to gawk at him as a cat is aware of a knife. 

After watching in silence for a couple of minutes, Neku said, “Where did you learn how to do that?”

Joshua Kiryu, without very much moving his lips, said “I was one of those gross little kids who fried ants.” And he twisted the glass in his fingers slightly, throwing off another blinding glare. 

Neku nodded, equal parts disgusted and enthralled. "Wait," he said. The boy threw him a glance to be quiet. Neku dug his hands into his pockets to keep still before continuing, his voice a tone quieter. "Wait, why?"

"... Because I have a control complex? I liked seeing them burn? I don't know. Why does anyone?" The boy spoke like a ventriloquist. His speech was soft and ambiguously feminine, like all his words were rolled in baby powder.

"No, why— why that guy? Why his book? Why do this? Is there a reason or are you just some particularly diabolical asshole, like, a serial book sniper, is this what you do on the weekends... You come here with your magnifying glass, you buy a weird pastry, you sit at your strategically located table and you just pick off whatever poor idiots come here to enjoy anything made of paper by lighting their reading material on fire, just one by one, is that who you are, is that— is that what you do? What's going on here? I need an explanation."

"I went to school with him last year." The way he said it implied that there was more to the thought. 

"And?"

"And on the last day he called me a dicksucking Addams family reject and accidentally slammed my hand in the bathroom door." He held up his free hand; his wrist was mottled with reddish-purple splotches.

"Oh." Neku sat back down.

“Anyway, my turn. How did you notice?”

“I’m an artist.”

“Hmm.”

“I mean, I have to look closely at like, light, shadow, how the light hits things and where the shadows fall and stuff. When I draw. So I’m sensitive to stuff like that.” Neku suddenly felt stupid, but continued to speak regardless. “I mean, there was this glint in my eye, and I was like, what the hell, where’s that coming from. And then I saw you up there, and then the light falling on his book.”

The boy huffed softly, sounding amused. “Are you really into chiaroscuro, then?”

Neku hadn’t taken art history yet. “That sounds dirty.” The boy pressed the back of his hand against his own silent laughter. “What?”

“Nothing. Why did you come here today? I saw you wandering around down there. You looked lost.”

“I was— I am— looking for a piece of street art by this one artist—”

“You like street art?”

“I’m passionate about it,” said Neku. His expression was one of barefaced honesty. “It’s this one artist, I swear to God they’re gonna blow up one day but they’re still kinda underground right now, I don’t know if you’ve heard of them—”

“Does this mystery artist have a name?”

“They go by CAT.” Says Neku. “Do you know them?”

Something inscrutable changed about Joshua’s smile. “Not at all.”

"But I, uh, I'm not very familiar with the area, so I came to this big dog statue—"

"The statue of Hachiko, you mean."

"Is that what it's called?"

“What?” Said Joshua, clearly in shock. “You don’t know the Hachiko story?”

“There’s a story?”

“Did… did you move here from under a rock?” Joshua could sense that Neku was about to deck him, so he continued: “Never mind. I’ll tell you. I’m fond of stories.“

**The Story of Hachiko**  
_(as told by Joshua Kiryu, age twelve)_

Once there was a scientist who had a dog. The dog was named Hachiko. This was a very loyal dog. Every day the scientist would to go his job at the University, and every day, when it was time for his return train to come back, Hachiko would wait for him at the station.

One day the scientist had a heart attack while at the University, and died. The dog was waiting for him at the station, but, obviously, the man didn’t come home. Out of loyalty, or grief, or stupidity? The dog continued to wait at the station for the man to come home every day. Then one day the dog died, too. The end.

The book lit a few seconds after Joshua had finished speaking. Neku was beginning to doubt it would ever happen when it did. First the smoke began to rise like ink in water. And then, like a goldfish unswallowing itself, the flame flickered alive.

Joshua’s lips twitched; the faintest hint of a crooked smile. “I’m God,” he said, jokingly.

Ski jacket screamed, and Joshua jerked the magnifying lens away, hiding it inside his sweater. He stood up. Even as the fire slowly grew, his victim was beginning to look around in confusion. Cardigan drew away from the table, backwards; the trees would obscure him from sight for now, but not forever, and it was definitely best to get going. "We should run." He said.

"We?" 

"He’s not quite as familiar with the concept of poetic justice as you or I. Lens or no lens, if he sees you up here looking suspicious, he's going to think it was you." He was picking up his tote bag and slinging it over his arm. The next thing he said as a joking insult, but Neku took it and he held it and that’s why everything happened: "Also, follow me. I know shortcuts and you were pretty lost before.”

Neku looked back down. Ski jacket’s eyes met his. The fire consumed the pages of the manga, now reaching almost to his fingertips. His eyes flickered and he did not shrink.

Neku was sprinting through the twisting backstreets of Shibuya with an unsettling and fascinating stranger. His sneakers popped against the asphalt. "I'm not a tourist," Neku shouted after him. "I just moved here."

"Mm?" The boy lilted. He was trying to hide it, but Neku could tell he was already out of breath. Interesting. “Getting to know your new town, then?”

“I told you, I came here to see—” Neku hooked a hard right to keep up, almost crashing into the wall he’d been racing towards. He was having a hard time keeping up casual conversation while also running at this speed. "Wait, where are you taking me?"

"A shortcut, I said. Were you listening?" 

"Shortcut to where?"

“Somewhere interesting.”

From Hachiko they'd been running for several minutes, now, so many twists and turns that if Neku hadn't been lost before, he certainly was now. It occurred to him that they must have ditched the boy in the jacket a while back, so he wasn't sure why they were still running full speed. (He also wasn’t sure why he was continuing to follow him. But there he was. Following him.)

They zipped straight down two red brick alleys, and as they turned another corner, Joshua stopped all at once. Neku had to focus all his weight into not crashing into him, backpedaling on his feet inches away. “Hey— whoa! Watch where—"

And then Neku stopped, because there was the CAT mural.

The skull at the center of the piece caught his eye first, and then Neku was seeing it all at once, a million times more radiant than the computer screens had conveyed. He found himself pulled towards it as if by gravity. The piece was an explosion of concept caught on a wall. Rainbows, hands coming out of hands coming out of keyholes. Something unfurling. There were red roses. Neku’s heart pounded wildly. He couldn’t possibly look away. 

He didn’t realize it for a very long time, but it was seeing this piece, right then, right there, on that day, that made Neku firm in his conviction that he wanted to be an artist. It couldn’t possibly have happened any other way. When he saw the mural, for just one moment he was sure: the reasons for every bite of misery, every moment of confusion and desperation, every bewildering and life-changing sorrow he’d ever had had been coded into a different pigment in a paint in a color on this wall, and if he worked at it, really threw himself into it and pored over it, for weeks, with endless piles of notebooks and worn stubs of pencils, mapping each hue to a different universal truth, he could come to know the reasons why those things had happened, because if he could just understand why, then he would finally be able to deal with them; and for just one moment, Neku couldn’t breathe.

“Oh my God…”

“It’s pretty nice, isn’t it?”

“ _Nice?_ It’s—” Neku had no idea what any of it meant but he wanted to dedicate his life to it. His blood felt like Italian soda drunk on the sunniest patio. “It’s.” He floundered for words. “Amazing.”

“It is very good,” Joshua said, seriously, “it’s just that I see it a lot, so I’m desensitized by now." 

“Yeah, well, I… CAT is honestly probably one of my favorite, if not— wait, hey!” Neku quickly turned around to find his strange new friend laughing silently again in that odd way, with his hand pressed to his mouth. Something twinkled in his eyes that hadn’t been there on the cafe patio; he seemed more genuinely amused now than when he was lighting someone’s manga on fire with a magnifying glass. For some reason, Neku was laughing too. He had just met Joshua, but he felt like he had known him a very long time. "You knew the whole time, didn't you?!"

"Mm, did I?" 

“Shut up! How did you…” but then Neku was distracted by the mural again and breathed out, smiling in awe. “Oh, man…”

Joshua was watching, clearly amused. “Hey, it’s been fun and all, but listen. I have to go.” Joshua said. He began climbing the rusted, red stairs of a fire escape hugging the wall on one of the buildings of the alley two at a time.

“Go?”

“Places to go, people to see. It’s—” the boy stopped, straightened up his shoulders for a moment. He turned around, looked at Neku with an odd expression— as though he’d only just remembered— and said “it’s my birthday. I’m twelve years old.”

Neku realized something. He had had fun. This boy was bizarre and evasive and had just almost got him beaten up and was insufferably irritating, but he was fun and funny and interesting and he liked CAT, and somehow— Neku had never met anyone his age like him before— he wasn’t terrifying to talk to. Neku was suddenly afraid. He was never good at reaching out to make friends. He was always anxious talking to other people. There couldn’t be very many other people like this boy, people Neku could be able to be friends with. Neku realized that he wouldn’t see him ever again. He shouted after him, “What is your name?”

But there was no response. The boy had already gone away running.

  
*******  


And so Neku never did see Joshua again. 

Until April fourteenth, when classes resumed at Sakuragawa Junior High. Neku saw him with all the other first-years at the entrance ceremony. He was easy to notice. Neku thought he had never met someone so unusual-looking. It wasn't that Neku thought of him as particularly attractive or unattractive— yet, anyway— but had more to do with how his manner gave off the impression that his uniform was somehow ill-fitting despite the fact that the size was technically perfect. In conjunction with his thin and angular limbs and his cornsilk hair, he altogether threw off the air of a living scarecrow. Neku saw him and he stared the whole time they were singing the school song. He kept staring while the principal gave his speech. He stared and stared until Joshua noticed him staring, and when he did, he saw Joshua’s eyes go wide, then narrow again. A moment passed through during which the two only made direct, expressionless eye contact, the understanding between them only implied, until, like a signal, Neku smiled.

The universe imploded. Joshua smiled also.

Through the sheerest and dumbest of luck, the two both found their homerooms to be class 2-B. Neku wrote his name on the chalkboard at the front of the class and stood with his shoulders half-mast as he relayed the name of his hometown. During role-call and introductions, Neku learned scarecrow’s name— Yoshiya Kiryu— that he had been born in Tokyo, and that it was nice to meet you. He then sat down and pulled a novel out of his desk.

The seat next to him was empty. As Neku set his bag down, a breeze knocked loose a handful of pink blossoms from the tree outside the classroom window. 

"I didn't know you were going here."

“I didn’t know you were going here.”

Joshua's pencil case was blue and white striped, with Mezzo Piano characters on it. "Cute," said Neku. Joshua rolled his eyes.

“...It’s not a sakura tree.”

“Huh?”

“The tree right out there.” Joshua gestured with his head towards the window. Neku looked at it. It was pink, but aside from that, it didn’t look like a sakura tree at all.

“Well, duh?”

“It’d be nice if it were a sakura tree. Then with the big window on the left wall there, the whole classroom would be laid out exactly how Black’s homeroom is in Tin Pin Slammurai.”

“What?” Said Neku.

“Nothing.” Joshua fiddled with the pencils in his case, staring into space. “It’s actually a Judas tree,” he said, absentmindedly.

“Hey,” said Neku suddenly. The title of the paperback peeking out of Joshua’s desk had caught his eye. “What’s that?”

”It’s called a book.”

“I know it’s a book, stupid, but is it— is that _The Boy Detectives Club_? By Edogawa Rampo?”

Joshua looked up. “Yes. Do you read?”

“I read _Boy Detectives_. It’s my favorite book. All Edogawa Rampo’s detective books are my favorite!” Said Neku. He was so enthusiastic. “Do you like it?!”

Joshua’s expression was unreadable. He almost looked as if he were in disbelief. “I… I really do like it.”

“Are you gonna join the literature club?”

“I’m probably going to join the going home after school club.” Joshua’s face cleared and he smiled wanly. “I don’t really talk to people.”

Neku tried to keep his expression under control and mostly he succeeded. But his eyes were sparkling. 

He was going to make the first friend he had ever had in his life.

“Me neither.”

  
***

When he left school that day, Neku thought that walking the corridors of his new junior high when no else was there was like walking along the bottom of a bog made of air, the cool dusky greens of the shadows in recesses, the seemingly ancient floors made of dark, soft planks of hard wood. A few years later, this thought— one of the handful of memories from this period of Neku’s life that would not one day, inexplicably, become murky and oddly vague— would make the time Neku spent at this school seem even more like a murky dream held up to the light. A pale blue shoebox full of loose polaroids smudged with dust and fingerprints, everything blurred and overexposed until he could recognize it at a distance but couldn’t tell you the details; the hallways, the Judas tree, the ink silhouette of someone who once sat next to him in class, face smeared beyond recognition.

After school, Joshua headed home alone, as usual. He stopped at Wildkat on the way, as usual. The chime on the door jingled as it shut behind him, as usual, Joshua a shadow slipping into an empty room. Late afternoon’s a slow time of day for a coffee shop; Josh was the only customer there. Hanekoma was behind the counter, recognizing him before his eyes even left the cup he was cleaning. “‘Sup, J?”

“Mr. H.” Joshua drew up to the counter, pulling himself onto a stool. Hanekoma started pouring him his regular: medium roast, milk, no sugar. Joshua had been drinking coffee since he was eleven and a half. Hanekoma usually switched it with decaf without telling him.

“How was your first day of junior high?” Hanekoma asked, sympathetically, as he set the drink down in front of him.

“Mr. H.” Said Joshua. He spoke as if he was choosing his words carefully. “The boy from two weeks ago. The one who said he was a big fan—”

“Yeah, the one you told me about.”

“He sits next to me in class. And he says that The Boy Detectives Club is his favorite book.”

Hanekoma began to brew a new pot of coffee. The lights over the bar gleamed softly, as if bringing the cafe in and out of focus. When Joshua wasn’t watching, Hanekoma flipped the sign on the door to read CLOSED. Joshua talked and talked and talked. About Neku, who was the first person Joshua’s age to speak more than three sentences to him in years, about the book Joshua was reading, about the cartoon he’d been watching, just about anything. Hanekoma mostly listened. It was a rare thing for Joshua to talk this much at once. There was the sound of the percolator and the quiet jazz drifting in and out and there was the way the deep yellow of the light made everything look, the dusky illumination in the places where it hit and the way the shadow receded into places where it couldn’t. It was like the cafe had become, just for then, an oil painting. Late, late into the night, Joshua talked, about anything, about everything, there, inside of that oil painting.


	2. like talking to a fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one where we learn a little bit about Joshua and Neku and Joshua make some plans to go to an arcade.

The second day of school, Joshua brought in a stack of books that was half the height of his entire body. The tottering pile of literature hid his face completely and the ones balanced at the top constantly threatened to fall from his arms. It was a wonder that they’d survived the long walk and train ride to school, and indeed there had been several near-disasters on the way; perhaps this was why Joshua was a few minutes later than usual. Neku was already dozing with his face on his desk when he got there. When Joshua shoved open the door and stepped into the mostly empty classroom, his legs human but his torso and face apparently made of books, like some kind of bizarre biblical reverse-mermaid, Neku thought that he was probably still dreaming. So rather than sleepily standing to help, he watched with one tired eye as Joshua set them all down—dropped them, to be realistic— on the desk. They fell with a resounding thump; the heaviness of the classics. Joshua stood back and dusted off his hands. Then he put them on his hips and looked at the space between Neku and the books with his head turned oddly, like he was putting a dotted line there— measuring something with his eyes and his brain.

“Have you read all of these, Neku?” He said. 

Neku sat up, like a proper twelve-year-old zombie, and started picking through the paperbacks before him. The Little Prince. Night on the Galactic Railroad. The Phantom Tollbooth. Children’s literature, but fancy stuff, for the most part, he thought. Some of the titles he thought he recognized, but the majority of them he certainly hadn’t read—except Railroad, last year, for Language Arts. Of all the books Joshua had brought, almost every copy was dog-eared, or tea-stained, or otherwise marked up. The scars of books well-read and loved.

He put the last one back and said, “No.”

“Then we have work to do.” Said Joshua.

After that, book club with Joshua became part of Neku’s daily homework. It nestled itself in importance right between pre-algebra and history and refused to leave. The books Joshua lent him always had plain covers in colors that had faded over time, dusty pale blue or old moss green, and paper with a slight grain against the fingertips. Neku proved himself a fast reader—voracious, even— although it weighed heavily on how much he liked whatever book Joshua had given him that time. He would go home with the books, read a few pages by the dim light of his desk lamp, slip a bookmark into the place where he got tired; then he’d go to school the next day with new little words riding in his mouth, questions, something interesting to say. Joshua demanded it. Somehow when Neku arrived Joshua was always ready in his seat, feet swinging slowly against the wood floor, and as soon as Neku sat down Joshua would be fixing him with a knowledge-hungry stare like a cat. Neku always either loved whatever book Joshua had given him, or he wanted to chuck it out of the nearest window. Either way the way he talked about what he’d read was passionate, and either way Joshua always had this tight little grin and a sparkle in his eyes as he listened to Neku’s opinions, the heel of his sneaker tapping on the wooden floor almost in rhythm with Neku’s speech. Then, when Neku had exhausted himself, Joshua would offer his own astoundingly intelligent literary analysis and carefully researched historical background and insight, which Neku very rarely understood much of beyond the fact that it meant Joshua was very strange and smart but which always seemed to Neku to prove him wrong in ways he hadn’t even known a person could be wrong before. It was infuriating. It was a mental challenge. He loved it.

_What did you think of this? What did you think of that? But then—_ In sneaky return, Joshua would stare over Neku’s shoulder at whatever he drew on the backs of his assignments and in his sketchbook during breaks. Neku drew habitually. If he went too long without, his fingers started to twitch. Joshua liked to sit with his chin on his hand and watch the pictures form. Sometimes Neku sketched whatever was around him, but sometimes he drew images that must have come straight from his imagination. Joshua counted—a girl pulling a ball of yarn endlessly out of her mouth, a rocking chair drawn intentionally as big as a house, strange figures in strange masks, steam trains rolling on tracks through the night sky. Joshua liked those pictures the best. To be honest, he was thrilled by them, although he’d never let on. He wondered what kinds of stories were locked up in those drawings, if there were any. Maybe less of a story and more of a dream trying to break free. 

There was a day after about two weeks of this where they both sat in the classroom eating lunch. Joshua bought his bento, and Neku brought one from home. They had pulled their desks up to face each other. The other children talked as they ate, or were still buying their lunches in the cafeteria, or had wandered off somewhere. Neku was lazily feeding himself baby carrots with his chopsticks while Joshua spoke.

“I’m almost running out of books for you to read.” Joshua said. His tone was mournful. “I don’t know what we’re going to do after you read The Secret Garden.”

“I could give you artists to look at,” Neku said. He wasn’t paying his full attention, half daydreaming. He was looking out the window. It was raining, big fat gray drops that spattered on the glass. 

“What, like, books of illustrations? Or photos…?” Joshua asked. “Do you have those…?”

“Yeah,” Neku said. He put a slice of carrot in his mouth and just held it there without chewing it.

“Neku, are you even listening to me?” Joshua said. Neku blinked twice in succession, looked at Joshua as though he was just remembering where he was, and then said this:

“Do you know any arcades?”

**! ! ! WE INTERRUPT YOUR PERFECTLY GOOD CHRONOLOGICALLY FORWARD-PROPULSED NARRATIVE TO JUST INFODUMP SOME NECESSARY FLASHBACKS FROM JOSHUA’S BACKSTORY IN THIS AU. JUST GONNA SHOVE THEM RIGHT IN THERE. WE COULDN’T THINK OF A GOOD WAY TO SEGUE THE STORY INTO THEM. WHO THE HELL CARES ABOUT ANYTHING! ! ! !**

Joshua was an off-putting child. His parents were piano sellers.

Which is to say: they only sold pianos. They did not: make, play, collect, clean, appreciate the aesthetic beauty of, or even very often touch pianos. And they did not sell the pianos from up close. His father Shichiro was an accountant in the upper offices of a piano-making company, and his mother Marie (Ma-ri-e, the Japanese name, and she wrote hers in kanji 万里絵 if we want to be specific) had been a secretary in the same office, before she had had Joshua. They knew no more or less about pianos than they had to know to file papers involving their sales. With a bit of training they might have sold scissors or stocks or sugarcane just as well, and would have done so with the same degree of passion. Make no mistake about what kind of people they were.

Joshua’s mother came from a Catholic family, something which you may already assume is rare in Japan. Because his father was in large part apathetic toward religion outside of societal obligations, Joshua was raised as a Catholic. He had a Catholic baptism, was usually brought along by his mother to Mass, had by now taken his first communion, and, if he were—Heaven forbid, of course, and I only include this instance hypothetically, the death of a child is such an unspeakable tragedy— if he were to die while still in his mother’s legal custody, Joshua would have a Catholic funeral. In many ways Joshua was already marked as different by the silver cross necklace his mother bound into his swaddling clothes. 

His father was distant.

And now three different vignettes from Joshua’s childhood: 

Figure A: Joshua was very young, just learning to talk, when he first asked his mother why some people had big black wings on their backs and some didn’t have any. The two of them were sitting in the den of the apartment. The TV was on. The two of them were lying on the couch and Marie was half watching the show, half curling the same lock of Joshua’s hair around her finger over and over. Joshua had asked the question suddenly, and she was confused. She didn’t understand him. No matter how many times Joshua tried, with his building block three-year-old vocabulary, to explain what he meant, his mother only cocked her head to the side, or frowned, or shook her head back and forth no. And so Joshua slowly grew frustrated and gave up. His words turned black and gooey, and they crawled back into him untaken.

Figure B: When Joshua was five years old he had learned two things: that the people around him did not always see everything that he saw, and that both suits and school uniforms were itchy, stiff, uncomfortable things. He was sitting in the lobby of a fancy hotel, picking over smoked salmon and orange juice. It was his aunt Kaede’s birthday. So, brunch at a fancy place. He had never met her before. She was giving a speech and she fainted. She fell like a paper fan closing and was carried out of the room by women who tried to wake her up by whispering. Like a good boy, Joshua stood quiet by a spray of flowers in a crystal vase while he listened hard. The people talked about the power some women on Marie’s side of the family had-- their migraines and sometimes also visions sent to them by God. Visions were dreams, Joshua learned, where you saw angels and devils and where God told you what you should do. You were the only person who saw them, not anyone else. Joshua was silent for ten minutes doing nothing but drinking the talk of the adults in through his ears. As everyone was finally making to sit back down, he tugged on his mother’s black pencil skirt, asking “Mommy, am I a girl?” 

Figure C: When Joshua was seven years old standing in front of the Wildkat coffee shop he watched a painting wrap itself around the head of a middle school girl and unzip her into nothingness. Into absence. Into air. Joshua was holding hands with his mother, and he had to stay completely expressionless the whole time. He knew he could do it this time; this had happened before. Last time he had cried at something no one else could see. This time he wouldn’t. Joshua knew he could do it this time. He found that he could not look away from what was happening. The girl was in the street, in the middle of the crossing. She saw him looking at her. She realized he could see her. Did she think he was another player? Did she think he could have helped her? From where Joshua stood, it looked like she opened her mouth to scream, but the tail of the indigo and spraypaint monster vanishing her was covering it. Maybe her mouth had already stopped existing entirely. Maybe there was nothing that could possibly have made a sound.

No blood to see. It wasn’t a gory scene. The whole idea of her just unraveled. Something, then, circularly, nothing.

Joshua had to look without blinking.

Arcane symbols forming in the sky. Hanging at least a dozen meters above their heads, who could possibly have written them? The girl vanished piece by piece. 

Backpack. T-shirt. Wallet. Skirt. 

Going. Going. Going. Gone.

. . . 

Joshua read. He wrote, prolifically, from the day he could pick up a black crayon. He watched loud, candy-colored children’s anime even once he had outgrown their target demographic. He listened to loud music alone in his room. 

He could not get the ghosts off his trail.

Why did he see them? Why him, and no one else. Joshua was a smart kid. It only took him until somewhere between ages six and seven to realize that the things he saw were most probably hallucinations. It took him until later, when he first met Mr. H, to realize that they were not. When he asked Mr. H his question, he didn’t have an answer. He could tell Joshua all about the nature of the ghosts. Feeding him information little by little, he explained to Joshua about the Game, its Players, its rules. But he didn’t have an answer for Joshua about why he, still alive, could see things only the dead could. At least, Joshua was pretty sure he was still alive. At night he sometimes lied in bed counting his pulse. One, two, three. 

One last thing:

From the age of ten to our story’s present, Joshua had the same recurring dream over and over again. It wasn’t the only dream he had, but it happened extremely often. In the dream all that happened was that the porcelain angel figure which his mother had placed lovingly on his nightstand hummed like some distant, otherworldly generator and the words MEMENTO MORI formed above, glowing red like neon in the dark quiet of Joshua’s bedroom. He wasn’t quite sure where he might have had heard the phrase before, on the gate of a churchyard maybe, but in the dreams it always seemed deeply familiar—anyway, every time, in all of the dreams, all he did was lie on his side and stare at the letters through the frame of his elbow and crooked forearm. He always stayed as still as he could. After about ten minutes, the dream was over.

**! ! ! WE NOW RETURN TO YOUR PERFECTLY GOOD CHRONOLOGICALLY FORWARD-PROPULSED NARRATIVE ! ! !**

“Do I… know any arcades?” 

“Yeah,” Neku said, more focused now. “I always kinda wanted to go to one, but there weren’t any where I grew up.”

“Oh, yeah, you lived out in the sticks.” Joshua remembered.

“Shut up. Come on, don’t you know any?”

“Hm.” Now it was Joshua’s turn to be lost in thought. Finding social interaction with most people as awkward and even stressful as he did, he was more one to enjoy his games at home, safely locked in his room. Not that he’d never been to an arcade before. He was twelve. It was Tokyo in 2003. Of course he knew a few. “Is there anything in particular you’re looking for...?

“Just.” Neku pulled out a piece of paper and a pencil and started doodling aimlessly.

“There’s this place called Mappyland,” Joshua said, struggling to remember. Mappyland was usually almost empty. Perfect. “I don’t know where you live, but it’s in Shibuya, it’s... here...” Joshua took his own pencil and, leaning over their desks, drew a crude map in the corner of Neku’s paper. He indicated Mappyland with a star and arrows. Neku watched intently.

“Oh, wow, that’s actually really easy to get to.” Neku said. Joshua felt oddly proud. And then Neku said:

“So you wanna go there Saturday?”

“What.” Joshua said. He wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly.

“Do you want to go there Saturday and hang out and play games together? If you’re not busy? Like... are you free?”

No one had ever asked Joshua to hang out with them outside of school before.

“I’m... not busy.”

No one in his entire life before, not even once.

“Cool! So do you want to meet there at like... I dunno, one o’ clock?”

The reality of the friendship began to permeate.

“One o’ clock is fine.”

The friendship? Like, something nostalgic? Something tinted orange? Something—

“Great, then I’ll see you there!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Illustrator:** [Ven](http://kirikoma.tumblr.com)  
>  **Beta for this chapter:** [Cipher](http://subasekas.tumblr.com)  
>  inexpressible thanks...
> 
>  
> 
> As of the upload of this chapter on 11/6/2015, the first chapter has also been updated to include more of Ven's startling(ly good and compact) art.
> 
>  
> 
> my apologies for this chapter taking so long; hopefully the third will come sooner.
> 
>  
> 
> the warm response to the first chapter is something that has me eternally grateful.


	3. arcade time!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Joshua and Neku go to the arcade, and then to Wildkat.

It was Joshua who ended up waiting. He was glad he brought his phone with him; he killed time messing with the new Tin Pin Slammurai mobile thing. He and Neku agreed to meet by the CAT mural that Joshua had shown Neku during their first meeting, because they both knew where it was and it was close to where they wanted to go. Joshua arrived too early and spent the spare time fretting. 

He was nervous Neku wasn’t going to show up, of course. It wouldn’t have been the first time a classmate had invited him somewhere to spend time, then stood him up as a joke. But also this week in particular was a bad time for him to be in Shibuya. He had been so surprised when Neku had asked him to come out with him that he’d forgotten all about it. But there was a Game this week. When a Reaper’s Game was being played, Joshua’s sixth sense always became exponentially sharper; the ghosts he saw were no longer faint things sliding in and out of the mouths of alleys and flickering like TV static, but kids as vivid as the living, usually running and always afraid, hunted by living graffiti that prowled with head low, hanging back to brick walls like shadows. Each alley became the throat of a different Antichrist; each fencepost another tooth. The Game was hungry for him; the city was a mouth.

You never really got used to it. And if you were unlucky you saw terrible things. Now that Joshua understood a little more about the things he saw, he tried to avoid Shibuya as much as possible when he knew a Game was going to happen.

“Hey,” said Neku, walking out of absolutely nowhere. He was taking out his plain white earbuds. Something tinny blasted from them, the lyrics audible to Joshua as Neku sheepishly turned the volume down. “Sorry, were you waiting for me?”

“No—” started Joshua too quickly, embarrassed at how early he’d been there. “Well, not really waiting, anyway.” The eyes of the cat on the mural seemed to bore into his back, musically chanting _Pants on fire._ Shut up, Joshua silently told them right back.

Neku cocked an eyebrow, and smiled a little bit like he was holding back a laugh. If it was there, it was not an unfriendly laugh, or a mocking laugh. “Okay,” he said. “So... show me the way!”

If you’ve never been in a Tokyo arcade, allow me to summarize the experience for you: dim lighting, slot machine noises from every direction, looping threads of slightly muffled music from the “INSERT COIN” intros to rhythm games, and, shockingly, absolutely no gum stuck to the floor. As Joshua and Neku stumbled in, the sound seemed to come from nowhere, as the arcade was almost devoid of customers— a few stragglers, lost high school students, NEETs, wandered around like background static. The clerk at the counter was nondescript. The boys went Dutch and took their tokens silently, and wandering a few steps away were left standing in the arcade. 

“This should be enough, right?” Joshua said, rubbing two of the shiny tokens together between his thumb and index finger. He’d never gone to an arcade with another person before and was beginning to wonder what the protocol for token splitting was. Well, they were going to be playing two-player games, right? But then who decided which games to play? Did they take turns? Then how did they decide who picked first? Rock paper scissors? 

“If we run out we can always just get more.” 

“Oh. Yeah.”

“But seriously, these are cheap here.” Neku said. He marveled at the treasure hoard of gold tokens now glittering in his hands as they weaved through the crooked aisles of machines, looking for a game to play. Joshua admitted that he hadn’t been here in a while; there were lots of new cabinets in that he didn’t recognize, had no idea what would be good or not. “Think you’re gonna lose?” Neku asked.

“Oh, no. I’m terrific at basically every kind of game.” Said Joshua. His chance. He’d taken the plain metal keychain on which he kept the spare keys into his own apartment out of his pocket, and was swinging it around in a circle on his index finger—a habit, maybe.

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah. Video games, board games, card games… Mind games.” Joshua looked at him quickly, shooting him with a hard glance and a grin. “I’m playing one with you right now.”

“Oh, really?” Neku said a second time. He was smiling.

“Yes. I’m bragging flippantly and broadly, projecting confidence. But I’m not providing evidence or detailed knowledge to back up my sweeping statements. So, I sound like a pompous idiot who has no idea what he’s actually talking about. You’re mentally discrediting me. You’re dropping your guard. But--” in the same fluid movement, Joshua caught his keys in his hand, used them to point play-menacingly, and brought his face up so close to Neku’s that their noses became neighbors— “that’s inaccurate, and you’re going down.”

That was it. Now Neku totally thinks I’m cool, Joshua thought.

He even snuck in a direct Slammurai reference. Word for word.

Neku grinned at him, the way a lion grins— with the ulterior motive of baring teeth. “Oh, really?”

“Is that all you can say?” 

“No, because I can also say— ‘don’t count on it.’”

They separated themselves, noticeably better rivals.

 *******

When they walked out of the arcade, they were both laughing. Neither could remember what they had originally been laughing about, but then Neku hit his head on a low-hanging sign, so they were laughing because of that. They walked to Wildkat. Neku just walked where Joshua was following, but it felt completely natural— like somehow he’d walked this path a million times before. In some world, his footprints were painted on the sidewalk in bright gold.

(Later, he would learn that he had, in fact, walked this path a million times before.)

Background noise for this scene: Joshua’s and Neku’s chatter—

“I don’t drink coffee.” 

“You’re going to.”

And the soft chime of Wildkat’s front door. When they got there, Hanekoma pulled a mug off the back shelf and spun it on the counter. He shot Josh a smile. The inside of the café was yellow.

“Hang on, hang on.” Said Neku, laughing, as he and Joshua climbed onto stools at the counter. “Sorry, where are we?”

“Impressive! That’s the first question we’ve asked since we left! You followed me the whole way here without asking me once where we were going!” Said Joshua. “I think we could be best friends.”

Joshua said the last sentence as a joke. 

But Neku said, “Okay.” And he smiled with all the honesty that the body of a lonely twelve-year-old boy made of broken bird bones and oil paints and black-blue bruised knees teetering on the edge of adolescence could hold. 

He smiled with yellow band-aids and summer bike rides with Joshua standing on the pegs, cicadas and ghost stories equally honored guests at sleepovers. 

He smiled with all the honesty of a kid who hasn’t been a teenager yet. 

He smiled with all of his grown-up teeth finally in, a smile that had a vague idea of braces on the horizon but knew that they weren’t quite there yet. 

There’s so much honesty in a smile like that. It’s so much and it’s so big. There’s pounds and pounds of sincerity— armfuls. It’s like something that wouldn’t know sarcasm’s name. Four years later if Neku saw himself smile like that he wouldn’t recognize himself. 

In actuality, it wasn’t as enormous of a thing as it seemed to Joshua. But the reality of the fact that he had just spent the day killing time with someone his age, in the same class of him, and that they hadn’t hated him— in fact, Neku had gotten at least 70 percent of the jokes he’d made, and laughed at most of them— all of the things Joshua thought he might say had fallen down the back of his throat, just like his crooked little smile. He had no idea what to say. Joshua Kiryu had never had a friend.

“Oh, J, don’t tell me you’ve kidnapped another one of your classmates,” said Hanekoma. 

Joshua turned to look at him swiftly, slamming his fist down on the counter. “I’m not releasing him this time until they pay the ransom.”

“This is the fifth one this week,” Hanekoma moaned.

“You know this guy?” Said Neku.

“He’s my co-conspirator.” Said Joshua.

“Oh?”

“Notice how there’s nobody else in the whole store? That’s not a coincidence. This coffee shop is a front.”

“A front to kidnap you.” Said Hanekoma quickly.

“Not just you specifically. It’s a whole kidnapping ring.”

“Right, right.” Said Neku.

“Agent H here provides the hostage stronghold.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I provide the children.”

“He lures them here on the pretext of spending the day at an arcade.”

“And then we lock them in the basement until their parents cough up the cash.”

“But they keep escaping.” Says Joshua. “That’s our only problem.”

“The only snag in our otherwise completely foolproof plan.” 

Neku looked back and forth between the two of them several times.

“Do I get to make one phone call to my parents?” He asked solemnly.

Joshua and Hanekoma burst out laughing simultaneously. A moment later, Neku did the same. 

“Neku, this is Mr. H. He’s like my uncle except we’re not related and my parents don’t really know who he is.”

“Nice to meet you,” said Neku. He was sitting down and so didn’t go for a full bow, but Mr. H seemed to accept and return the head nod just fine. 

“This is Neku Sakuraba. He sits next to me at school.” Said Joshua.

“Oh, _the_ Neku?”

“What?”

“Never mind. How do you take your coffee, Neku?”

“I don’t d—I’ve never had coffee before.” Neku answered.

“Give him your strongest roast. Straight black.” Joshua said gleefully.

“Don’t be mean. I’m not going to do that,” Hanekoma said. “Hang on a sec.” He turned around and did some wizardry on the machines behind him. Neku watched with fascination as he tugged spigots and black liquid, like silk, poured into the pure white cups. 

“Cream? Sugar?” He asked, before looking thoughtful for a moment. “You’ll probably want cream and sugar.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter is a little short.
> 
> I've revised the previous chapters and updated the fic's Important Notes, summary, and so on. Updates might be a little speedier from here on as I think I have more of an idea what I'm doing now, sorry about the delay. Nyeh nyeh nyeh. If you like the fic, comments make me really, really, really happy. Thank you so much!


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